The Art Of Laundry

I'm always looking for new ideas to help bring our home into order, so I thought I'd share our method for doing laundry. A few years ago I found these cute baskets on sale at Target. They were actually Hanukkah baskets with a removable blue liner. So I took them home threw the liners away and started thinking about how I could use them. I decided to make these cute tags for everyone in our family, tie them to the baskets and set them on the shelf above the washer and dryer. Now, when I do laundry I can quickly sort, intimates into the appropriate baskets, right as they come out of the dryer, then I set out the baskets for everyone to take and put away. We've loved this idea and had lots of fun making the tags by using letter stickers and card stock. Then I laminated the card stock and applied 3-D stickers for added dimension. I used a grommet maker for the hole and tied the tags on with ribbon.

I also thought I'd share our laundry schedule. We started with a primitive form of a laundry schedule about a year ago when I was first teaching the kids how to do laundry. They were in the learning stage so we set aside a day to do their laundry together. As they've gotten older they've learned to do it independently with just a reminder to change it when the cycle is finished and some help folding. Recently we added linens and towels into the schedule so that everything has a day, and for the first time EVER, I don't feel buried by constant laundry. Getting the laundry done for that day assures that everything runs smoothly and will get done. It amazes me how something SO simple can bring such order and peace.

I also love doing linens on Mondays! It's just a great feeling to get those sheets off the bed and in the washer, and motivates me to get the rest of the house back in order for the week. It's exciting to me to start the week clean and orderly!

Here is our laundry schedule....

Monday- Linens ( sheets/ bath towels) Everyone strips beds every Monday morning and brings

linens down to the laundry room.

Tuesday- Jessica's Laundry

Wednesday - Ryan's Laundry

Thursday - Me and David's Laundry

Friday- Misc. (Robes, Blankets, Kitchen Towels ect. / catch-up on anything running behind)

May your home be blessed with order and peace.

Our Family Eating plan

I love the New Year! I am a planner, I love to reflect, plan and prepare for all of our goals and dreams for the New Year. One thing that has drastically changed for us this year is the way we eat. I was just journaling and thought it might be a good thing to share.

In all honesty I've struggled with whether to keep this blog going or not. A few things have been on my heart. One, I read sometime in the last year that many many moms are being sidetracked by the overuse of blogging and the Internet. It's very similar to spending hours and hours visiting friends instead of tending to all the real priorities in our day. Being a mom is a busy job, and I don't want to pull myself or others away from that to spend more time on the internet. Still, when I pull up this blog I see the things of Jesus and I'm proud of that. We need each other, and we need a place to be encouraged and share. So I will continue to write and share as the Lord lays new things on my heart, but also just use it as a place to journal my own thoughts.

Our new eating plan...

I say new, but really we've always we've always been fairly healthy eaters. We do try to avoid processed stuff, bake our own bread, make our own yogurt and generally drink no softdrinks or caffine. I recently bought David an expresso maker for Christmas and decided to start drinking regular expresso instead of decaf and tonight had a migrane! So guess it's back to decaf in the morning! The truth is our new eating plan has been in the making for several months.. we've been talking about really wanting to decrease the amount of sugar we've been eating. I started reading two books, What the Bible Says about Healthy Living Cookbook and The Yeast Connection. Both spurred me on to talk to David about what priorities we should focus on in our diet, shopping and cooking. We love organic foods, so that was top on our list. Also we decided that we wanted to eat clean, and that we wanted to eat for health. Your priorities may look different, the things is, if you try to eat low fat, low carb, vegetarian, low salt, gluten free, low pollution, local, and seasonal... you may be left eating rice cakes for breakfast lunch and dinner so we had to find what we wanted to eat and why.

This is our list
Less sugar- this includes cereal...only Kashi whole grain, cane sugar sweetened, this also includes looking at some low carb recipes and alternative sweetners. (splenda, stevia, and agave nectar)
Less fat
More greens
Healthy snacks- whole grains, fruits, veggies, cheese, nuts and nutbutters
Good quality organic beef and chicken sparingly (free range, hormone free)
Add fish into our diet
More water

and finally...
No pork, shrimp, shellfish, .....this is the biggest change we made and we had to really think about this choice. Ultimately we decided that since these animals are scavengers we didn't really want to eat them. These are some of our favorite foods, but we decided instead that as a matter of health we would give these up and see how we feel. For us this really was a personal choice to try to eat things that work best with our bodies to promote health. All these changes have been very positive for us so far. We have felt better and healthier, shed a few pounds (always good!!) but most of all we feel very intentional about the things we are eating. I love most of all that we established priorities that we are living by for life. Our kids are proud too, that we are eating more intentionally and have adapted very well to our new changes. I've included their new favorite breakfast treat Yogurt sundays.

Yogurt sunday
yogurt plain or vanilla (lowest sugar count you can find without using aspartame) PROTEIN
fresh banana slices - FRUIT
fresh stawberry slices -FRUIT
fresh blueberries- FRUIT
1 TBS (or less) of mini chocolate chips - FUN:)

1 tsp of chopped pecans / walnuts PROTEIN/ HEALTHY FATS


David also recently began making homemade applesauce from organic apples. It's amazing how the kids love real food! They love his applesauce.

6-8 apples
add cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla to taste
can be sweetened to taste if desired with natural apple juice, or your choice of sweetner. Cook until soft. Mash to desired texture.